The Garden of Letters Read Online Free PDF Page A

reach toward his wife’s hand.
    “I’m glad I’ve always played my violin with my eyes closed . . . Had I seen your mother in the front pew, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders and her eyes as green as tulip leaves, I would have forgotten every single note. I’m thankful I saw her only after I’d finished playing.”
    Orsina beamed. “I told your grandmother that I wanted to learn to play like that. But she shook her head and told me that such playing could not be taught. That is a kiss on the head from God.
    “The line was so long to meet your father after that concert. The cultural director himself had to stand between him and the crowd.” Her mother’s black hair was now streaked with wisps of gray, but Elodie could always still see the young girl beneath whenever her mother laughed.
    “I saw you right away, Orsina,” her father said. The years melted away from his wife’s face as he saw her once again standing there in front of him for the first time. The pale lemon dress, the jet-black hair, the sparkling eyes. He remembered with great sweetness how her hands trembled as she handed over her program for him to sign.

    “He took me from my beautiful lagoon,” her mother would now say, so many years later. “But I have no regrets.” But sometimes, on very hot nights, Elodie could detect a wistfulness in her mother’s voice. There was a parchedness, a thirst within her words. And when the summer bore down its horrendous heat, Elodie could hear her mother’s words like an elegy, sad and full of longing.
    “It’s the dryness of the heat here. I’m not used to it . . .” Every summer brought the same lament. Elodie would watch sympathetically as her mother took a handkerchief to wipe her forehead. “I grew up surrounded by water. Inky blue. Green and black. We marked the seasons by the height of water, the mist, and the fog. As a child, my first memory was the touch of water. My first taste was the salt from the sea.”
    Elodie knew her mother had tried to fill her life with all things beautiful, and that she saw life through a unique prism. A pair of optimistic eyes. One only had to shift the angle to reveal another facet, to radiate another beam of light.
    She filled their house with flowers. Venetian vases the color of ribbon candy were abloom with lilacs in the spring and roses in the summer. She prepared comforting food from her childhood: baccalá and polenta. Risotto steeped in squid ink and Burano cookies, which her father had loved to dip in sweet wine. But music she left to her husband and daughter. The only time Elodie ever heard her mother sing was when she was alone in her bath.
    Does everyone have a song? Elodie wondered if even those not blessed with a musical gift still had their own melody somewhere locked within. Her mother’s voice emerged only when she was shoulder deep in water. It struck Elodie like the gentle hum of honeybees, modest and sweet. It floated over the steam of the bath. She saw her mother’s hair piled on top of her head. Her long neck like a swan’s, the angles of her well-chiseled face. She sang songs in Venetian dialect. Mostly love songs, but occasionally she would sing one of the melancholy ballads of the gondoliers.
    But it was the latest French songs that her mother seemed to love the most. Her affection for Paris had been the reason she had chosen a French name for her daughter. “Your name came to me like the notes from a harp,” she would tell Elodie. And she would smile at her daughter, knowing that although she had never yet visited that other city of bridges and light, she had created something with its own sparkle and beauty.
    Orsina believed that her singing was her own secret. Little did she know that on the nights when she excused herself to bathe, Elodie and her father would lock eyes. If they were practicing their instruments, at the sound of the heated bathwater being poured, they’d place down their bows. Then the two of them